Porn collection put people off upgrading to Firefox 3 | Hacker News Reader

Porn collection put people off upgrading to Firefox 3

pcpro.co.uk

67 pointsjedliu32 comments

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There's a nice object lesson here about fully understanding the impact of a system change on your users. Making things "better" for them often isn't.

Actually, I think that the lesson is more of balancing existing, niche user needs against prospective mass user needs. Almost nobody gets this right, but it's a wonderfully challenging game.

For one, I would have made the awesome-bar return some search results as well, and made it impossible to distinguish between those and the bookmark results. They could also have compared auto-completes against whitelists/blacklists.

With that kind of attitude, user interfaces should never, ever change. I don't think a conservative attitude like this is the path to success.

With that kind of attitude, user interface changes get carefully considered and tested before being rolled out.

That's like saying that before writing a blog post, one should consult a psychologist to research every word's implications on human readers.

If you have a multi-billion dollar budget to test every pixel of the user interface then fine, but what if you're an indie developer and have to do with a budget of $100?

Then do A / B testing.

The "cheep" way to do A / B testing is for B to always be the existing system. Roll out changes to 10% of your users and see how they respond. Just remember if your users hate it then fix the problem and test it again or abandon the idea. So, this only works when you can measure how they resound to changes.

Allow for the change to bed in. When the awesome bar came out I immediately disliked it, possibly hated it even: now I find it both useful and generally awesome. It [the awesome bar] takes time to learn the best response to each key string, now i rarely need to type more than 3 letters to find the address i want, often just one letter.

Also a UI change can get more plaudits by virtue of the placebo effect, IMO (I've not done double blind tests!), making things appear better simply cause the look has changed.

With that kind of attitude, people will never understand each others differing viewpoints in a respectful way. :^)

firefox 3's location bar is a mess, not just because of this issue. It will suggest me a gmail authentication string for almost all of my inputs. There are lots of ways to do this better. I like chromes way of doing it, but it has some privacy issues.

If you select a different entry then that entry gets promoted next time you type the same string. So if you type "g" and a gmail address comes up but you cursor down to "engadget" (say) then next time you press "g" engadget is more likely to come up. After a few iterations g will bring up engadget as the first selection. It's awesome!

awesome? you're easily impressed, are you? :)

I think he was jokingly using the name of the 'Awesome Bar' in his response.

Ok you're right.

Firefox on the other hand seems to be kind of a douche, calling itself awesome.

You can select a suggestion with the arrow keys and hit Delete to delete anything.

I know but I would have to do it after every login at gmail. Firefox should just not include substrings.

I wrote a proposal for an extension that could passively solve the porn+awesomebar problem in the same way that AdBlock Plus passively solves the ad blocking problem. Since I am not a coder, I can’t whip up an alpha proof of concept, but perhaps someone else can take a crack at it. (I pitched it to Wladimir Palant a while back, but he wasn’t interested).

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/2/5/43412/24669

Apparently, there are already hooks in userChrome.css that allow preventing results from appearing in the awesomebar on a per URL basis:

http://ed.agadak.net/2009/02/hiding-history-with-userchrome

Porn is that important to that many??? Just use the google search to go to such websites! The people they are trying to hide it from obviously are not tech savvy and won't know what cache is or where to find it.

make it turnoffable!

It is.

A pointer to how would be useful...

go to about:config, set places.frecency.unvisitedBookmarkBonus and places.frecency.unvisitedTypedBonus to 0. Then use private browsing when you visit those "secret" links.

I don't have any secrets in my bookmarks, but I'd like the awesomebar to be turned off (i.e. just get simple url-completion.)

Thanks for the tips!

or go to about:config and set browser.urlbar.richResults to false.

Is that a preference that I need to add, or did you mean browser.urlbar.maxRichResults?

No, setting maxRichResults to 0 totally breaks the bar (no completion at all when typing.)

No, maxRichResults and richResults are separate preferences. See also:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.urlbar.richResults

and

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.urlbar.maxRichResults

Thanks for the links and clarification.

The page on browser.urlbar.richResults says: "Has an effect in * Mozilla Firefox (nightly builds from 2007-11-29 to 2007-12-17)"

So I guess you need to do what it says under "Background" to get rid of the awesome bar: "If you’d like to disable the improved Location Bar dropdown in a version of Firefox without this preference, try the oldbar extension."

Firefox private browsing aka porn mode:

http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Firefox_s_Private_Browsing__AK...

This article is about the awesomebar exposing bookmarks that previously were only accessible through navigating deep folder hierarchies. Porn mode has nothing to do with this. Read the article.

Saying it has "nothing" to do with it is a bit extreme. What if "porn mode" (private browsing) were implemented as a password protected sub-session that allowed bookmarks to be saved, cookies kept, etc., but insulated from the standard browser use with files saved in an encrypted folder.

That would also allow for a person to masquerade more easily as different users.

Indeed private browsing mode could be another, hidden, user profile that happens to have encryption - if a username:password is supplied then the session is saved, if not then it's deleted on browser close.

Porn mode has everything to do with this - yes, they're separate features, but they relate strongly to each other. Private Browsing avoids saving visited sites to history, which includes stopping them from appearing in the Awesomebar.

Between 3.0 and 3.5, there was Awesomebar but no Private Browsing. So when you typed 'g' to start 'gmail.com', it might have shown 'Naked Black Girls', which appeared in your history because there was no private browsing and you forgot to manually clear the cache.

The ideal would have been to introduce Private Browsing and Awesomebar at the same time, to handle this situations.

You're not paying the slightest bit of attention. This is for BOOKMARKS, not history.

Did you read the article? The article mentions private browsing mode but doesn't provide any details.

No wonder Mozilla hastily introduce a Private Browsing mode in Firefox 3.5…

The above link simply provides more information on it.

The "porn mode" comes from the title of the link itself.

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